The 30-year-old priest flew to Italy with an unnamed 18-year-old woman who is a recent graduate of McGill-Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile, which Father Crow also attended.

On the plane home from Mongolia, Pope Francis answered several questions about this October’s synod of bishops.

Since the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis has constantly looked to the peripheries both in the choice of countries to visit and men to make cardinals.. And he has consistently looked to the East where he detects the first signs of a new springtime for the Catholic Church

Among the hundreds of onlookers from several countries at the back of the square were many Catholics from mainland China, present in defiance of an order from the authorities in Beijing prohibiting not only the bishops of mainland China but also the country’s Catholics from traveling to Mongolia.

Without daily prayer and respect for the structure and unity of the church, “our strength will fail, and our pastoral work will risk becoming an empty delivery of services, a roster of duties that end up inducing only weariness and frustration,” Pope Francis said in Ulaanbaatar on Sept. 2.

The chairman of the U.S. bishops’ domestic policy committee said the nation has “urgent work” to do to really show a “radical solidarity with working families.”

Onboard his flight to Mongolia, Pope Francis said he knew some people were upset by the remarks, but the church must keep moving forward. “They got angry, but let’s move on, move on.”

Pope Francis has a problem with American Catholic ideologues. Maybe he’s talking about you.

No bishop from mainland China has been allowed to travel to Mongolia as Pope Francis makes the first-ever visit by the leader of the Catholic Church to this vast landlocked country sandwiched between China and Russia.

The kind of diversity sought after at a hospital, an engineering firm or a Catholic university should differ according to the gifts necessary for the mission of such institutions.